Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Answer: there is no upper limit.

Regulars know I am not an ad hominem kinda guy (unless they really really deserve it). But stuff like this pushes me well beyond my limit.

Synopsis: on The View, a horrifying chit chat show where Barbara Walters stands out as an intellectual giant, their new co-host — and I can barely type this, it makes my brain hurt so much — says she doesn’t know if the Earth is flat or not.

You may wish to reread that. I don’t recommend it, though, if you don’t want your cerebrum to explode outwards in all directions at the speed of light.

The link above has a video on it, in case you simply can’t imagine that anyone who would land a job as co-host of a national TV program could actually not know for sure what the general shape of the planet is. Sherri Shepherd, the person in question, knocks it out of the park, though. This, after saying she doesn’t "believe in evolution, period."

Hey, that’s something we share! I don’t "believe" in it either. I don’t believe in anything, especially rock solid facts. I know evolution is real. Belief is for things without evidence.

Anyway, when Whoopi Goldberg (who is actually pretty smart) presses her on this, Ms. Shepherd demurs, saying that it’s more important for her to know how to care for her son. This is almost legitimate. Almost. But it misses. If this were a thousand years ago, and she were toiling in a cave someplace with no access to information and spending 20 hours a day trying to keep her family fed, then sure, some knowledge may simply be too esoteric to be useful and, worse, distract from the actual task of survival.

But that isn’t the case. Here we have an actress and singer who is living, if I read my calendar and atlas correctly, in the 21st Century in the United States. Has she never seen a picture of the Earth from space? As it happens, a vast majority of people in the U.S. can hold a job, care for their family, and also know that the Earth is, y’know, round. Some people (though sadly, not enough) also know it takes the Earth a year to go around the Sun, that gravity makes things fall, and that DNA is a big molecule in which genetic information is coded. None of this is needed to feed your family (unless you are a science writer), yet humans are in general capable of handling a vast amount of information not directly pertaining to immediate survival.

For someone in Ms. Shepherd’s position to not know the Earth is a ball is really just beyond my ken (sadly, not believing in evolution is par for this country’s course). ^*

Now, there are lots and lots of people out there who lack an education (and there is blame to go around aplenty, there) or for whatever reason may not understand the Earth is a sphere. But then, how many of them get to be co-host on a TV show seen by millions of people every day?

Look, don’t get me wrong: people have priorities, and for some, I understand that even basic knowledge of the Universe around them isn’t among those priorities. But a co-host on a TV show like this should be for role models, for people who will have an informed opinion and who will make the viewers think. Yes, there are demogogue shows with bloviating ignoramuses as hosts, too many to name. But The View is not really one of them. Shallow, yes, but not — pardon the expression — geometrically flat.

The producers of The View need to seriously rethink this. But then, it’s not like they’ve shown brilliance in discretion when they’ve picked past hosts. Maybe they just want to drum up controversy. In the sad world of network TV, that would also be par for the course.

But this… sigh. It goes to show what a long, long road we have ahead of us.

Tip o’ the Mercator projection to Mike’s Weekly Skeptical Rant, which is really ad hom, and has much NSFW language.

^* I will give her some credit, though: when asked what she would do if her young son asked her if the Earth were flat, her reply was, "I’d look it up".” That is the right answer. However, given her comment on evolution, I fear for where she would look it up.

Via the Google blog comes the news of a new app: Google Moon!

It’s very cool, and you can even select the Apollo landing sites. When you zoom in, it shows you the locations of various moonwalks, pieces of equipment, and more.

They were pretty clear about its use in the press release:

Google Moon’s visible imagery and topography are aligned with the recently updated lunar coordinate system and can be used for scientifically accurate mission planning and data analysis. The new site is designed to be user- friendly and encourage the exchange of data and ideas among scientists and amateur astronomers.

Nice. It’ll be interesting to see how this might play out when it’s time to start landing there again. I would love to see the LRO data get integrated into this next year, too.

One irritating thing (that isn’t Google’s fault) is that in many parts, the craters look like domes! This is because the illumination from the Sun is coming from some direction other than down, toward the bottom of your screen. As humans, we evolved to perceive objects as if they are illuminated from above, and when they aren’t, it confuses our poor brains. Depressions look like bumps, and vice-versa.

In fact, this can be avoided by having different data able to be put into the database; the Lunar Ranger series mapped almost the entire Moon, so I bet there are more images to choose from.

But back on topic, I can think of lots of APIs (little programs designed to use the interface) to go with this one! And once my book is done, I’ll have time to fool around…

And no, when you zoom all the way in, it’s not made of cheese.

According to AdelaideNow (Australia), a meteorite fell on a village in Peru, and now the villagers are complaining of all manners of sickness:

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was a plane crashing near their remote village, in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.

Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a “strange odour,” local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.

Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being taken to hospital, Mr Lopez said.

Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene where the meteorite had left a crater 30m wide and 6m deep, said local official Marco Limache.

“Boiling water started coming out of the crater and particles of rock and cinders were found nearby. Residents are very concerned,” he said.

Interesting. Typically, you don’t get small craters (like a meter across) because the meteorite needed to produce something in that size range would be so small that it wouldn’t be moving very quickly when it hit the ground (200 kph or so). Big craters, hundreds of meters across, are formed when a big object hits at hypersonic speeds, because the air doesn’t slow them down much. Craters intermediate in size are very rare, as far as I seen; an object, say, 10 meters across will still be moving at quite a clip when it hits, but not at hypersonic speeds. So the crater size makes me suspicious; I wouldn’t expect a flaming meteorite at that size… but I won’t rule it out with my limited knowledge.

The smoke and other effects make me very suspicious indeed. You just don’t get that sort of thing from a meteorite! Maybe this was space debris, a satellite re-entering. Or it was misreported. Or maybe it was something else. I’ll keep my eyes open for more news; add a comment if you hear more. Boing Boing has an image of the crater.

Part II coming soon.

So now Daily Static is in on this, too? Yegads.

I wonder… maybe I should copyright the Moon Hoax idea. Then people would have to pay me to use the idea, and I could sue YouTube to take down anything mentioning the words "Moon" and "Hoax" or "fake"… except I’m not an evil jerk. Oh, those pesky morals! They’ll never let me get rich in a quick and easy way.

This has been a long time coming.

Due to an obvious and cheap attempt at cheating, last year PZ Myers won the Best Science Blog of 2006 award. However, I cannot prove he cheated — and while such a triviality as actual evidence may not stop 99% of the world at large, I am a scientist, and must go with what I can prove.

So PZ won, and I lost a bet with him. Had I won, he would pose for the Skepchick calendar. However, had I lost, I was to sing PZ’s praises at the 2007 Amaz!ng Meeting and write a blog entry as well.

I lost, so I did what I had to do as an honorable man. I waited to do the blog entry because I wanted to add the video, and that has finally become available. Here you go:

I think this video embedded here counts toward both aspects of the bet.

I hear PZ posed for the calendar anyway. Sucker.

My great thanks to Rich at JREF for putting the video together for me. You can buy the DVD of TAM 5 here, and the resolution on the DVD is much better than what you see on YouTube. Duh.